The Great Baptist Preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon Will Never Be Popular With The "Easy Christianity" Crowd
Why do I love the preaching of Spurgeon? Spurgeon is no-nonsense and he is indeed the prince of Reformed Theology and classic Baptist theology. It's crazy to be a Baptist and yet hate the preaching of one of the mightiest Baptists of all time, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. This man of God took the Bible chapter by chapter, verse by verse and he just doesn't pick one passage and then leaves another. He was a man who battled Antinomianism and at one point, rebuked a drunkard who claimed to be a Christian based on his autobiography. He was a man who did not deviate from the truth and said that true salvation will indeed change the soul for the better, while he does not teach the heresy of sinless perfection but he reveals every saved person will have a real change of life. As he said, "Another proof of the conquest of a soul for Christ will be found in a real change in life. If a man does not live differently from what he did before, both at home and abroad, his repentance needs to be repented of and his conversion is a FICTION." Amen, Brother Spurgeon!
Today we have churches that accept easy converts, that is converts who never were saved. We have people led to a prayer without understanding the severity and guilt of sin. We have people who supposedly got saved but later, they live like devils. Worse, there are people who say, "Oh they are still saved because they believed." But the truth is, such people never believed to start with. They departed because as 1 John 2:19 says that they were not of us. The problem is instead of examining their conversion, a lot of people just say, "You shouldn't be doing that because you are a Christian." instead of, "Wait, I doubt it that you even trusted Christ. Did not the holiness of God shock you and does not salvation supposedly change your life?" Instead, they say stuff like, "You are a Papist and a Jesuit if you do not accept the carnal Christians!" which uses the argument of false dilemma because just because a person disagrees with you, does not make the person a Jesuit because he could be an atheist or any other type of person. What they do not realize is that while Christians may fall into states of carnality (sarkinois) like a healthy man may catch a flu on a flu season, however the Christian can never be sarkikos or that is in a perpetual state of carnality. If they were saved, they should experience God's loving chastising (Hebrews 12:5-7) and they will be restored. If they were saved then there has to be change.
On conversions, he also said, "If the professed convert distinctly and deliberately declares that he knows the Lord's will but does not mean to attend to it, you are not to pamper his presumption, but it is your duty to assure him that he is not saved. Do not suppose that the Gospel is magnified or God glorified by going to the worldlings and telling them that they may be saved at this moment by simply accepting Christ as their Saviour, while they are wedded to their idols, and their hearts are still in love with sin. If I do so I tell them a lie, pervert the Gospel, insult Christ, and turn the grace of God into lasciviousness." I am insulted to think every time they say, "Well he's a Christian but just carnal and even if he does not grow in Christ, he is still saved." because how in the world can you be saved and have no change when God' by His grace sanctifies all he saves? 1 Corinthians 6:11 reveals the change from the unsaved to the saved that God therefore has sanctified (set apart) and washed the sinner. Titus 2:11-14 declares that by God's grace, those who are redeemed by Christ now will become a peculiar people zealous unto good works. Ephesians 2:10 has every Christian ordained unto good works. While no works can save a man because all men are sinners, no man is ever a saved man and yet not result to any good work.
Spurgeon refused to compromise what the Bible said when he said, "The astronomers cannot put the stars in a row of gas lights to please you; and the minister cannot put the doctrines into a shape in which you would have them cast. All the astronomer does is to map them out and say, 'That is how they are in the sky.' You must then look at the sky and see whether it is so. All I have to do is to tell you what I can find in the Bible; if you do not like it, remember that there is no refutation to it nor do I care for your liking or not liking it. The only thing is, is it in the Bible?" If the prophet of God only comes to deliver God's warning about the future and not to magically say something then it will come true, the same goes for the preacher of God. The true preacher of God claims no power over the Scriptures. "Easy Christianity" followers just wants a preacher who quotes some verses on salvation by grace through faith but they want to cut out the rest of Scripture. With that in mind, I really have every room to doubt their claims of being Christians.
He also said, "It is not enough to do the correct thing, it must be done in a right spirit, and with a pure motive. A good action is not wholly good unless it be done for the glory of God, and because of the greatness and goodness of His holy Name." He was emphasizing on what a real good work is. that is a work is never good unless it be done for the glory of God. That is, no good work is really good unless it's done for the glory of God. He differentiates the good actions of those who are just morally good against those who are saved by the blood of the Lamb. Does not Hebrews 9:14 say that Christians are redeemed from dead works to serve the true and the living God? To say that salvation is by faith alone but not a faith that is alone is not at all contradictory. Faith itself is the seed, good works are the inevitable result by God's grace and not by man's effort just as the tree is determined by its seed and by its fruit, hence faith is the seed that grows the good tree in the Christian, watered by God's grace which again, a believer's changed life is by the glory of God. Indeed, true salvation makes one do good works but not for one's self but for the greater glory of God or Sola Deo Gloria, Glory to God Alone!
He also went against sinless perfectionism when he said, "The saved man is not a perfect man but his heart's desire is to become perfect, he is always panting after perfection and the day will come when he will be perfected,a fter the image of his once crucified and now glorified Saviour, in knowledge and true holiness." His emphasis was you are a Christian but you are not sinless, no not yet because you are still in the body of flesh. You are no longer sarkikos but you can still fall into sarkinois or a temporal state of carnality. When a man is truly a Christian, they will go up and even if the experience regression, they will be convicted of their sins, confess and they have 1 John 1:8-9 which God is more than willing to forgive their sin because the are His. More than just forgiving, the Christian receives washing. The Christian is expected to cross mud pits, fail and like Peter who was about to drown, they need to be picked up. How often has it since Jesus had to catch me up and tell me, "Ye of so little faith." and increase my faith every now and then? I may still sin daily in my thoughts and in my words, but I do not live in a life of reveling in sin because I have been saved and I will grow in grace as 2 Peter 3:18 tells Christians to grow in grace.
I am indeed thankful that the people of Grace to You ministry with people namely John F. Macarthur and Philip Johnson, two of its pastors have organized the magnificent Spurgeon Archive. Spurgeon preached 3,000+ hard sermons and many are still unfound yet many were blessed by so much of a godly man's preaching. Too bad, "Easy Christianity" will always hate such hard preaching because they just want to take it easy all the time. As John Macarthur said in his recent edition of Hard to Believe (the old statement was an editing error), he said this, "Don’t believe anyone who says it’s easy to become a Christian. Salvation for sinners cost God His own Son; it cost God’s Son His life, and it’ll cost you the same thing. Salvation isn’t gained by reciting mere words. Saving faith transforms the heart, and that in turn transforms behavior. Faith’s fruit is seen in actions, not intentions. There’s no room for passive spectators: words without actions are empty and futile. Remember that what John saw in his vision of judgment was a Book of Life, not a book of Words or Book of Intellectual Musings. The life we live, not the words we speak, reveals whether our faith is authentic."